Kokoro

A post that's been long overdue.

After reading Kokoro, Francis brought to our attention (not for the first time) that "there must be hope." Just as we've been seeing in Takaki, there must be hope - these people are coming to America and staying in America, despite hardship, and why? "There must be something good!" And so Francis's question was, "Where is the hope? What is the hope?"

Someone suggested that the hope within the work was the fact that Yasako was dealt a lesser sentence by the court, but that fell short. Someone else noted that there was hope in Yasako's decision to live rather than attempt suicide again.

I think the hope in the work is multi-faceted -- but I am aligned with Francis in questioning the "hope" of the American judicial system within the drama. And I have to say, it's my opinion that the hope has nothing to do with her punishment or the "leniency" of the jury. I think the hope is very personal and centers around Yasako herself, not the "system" that works upon her.

I think that the hope is really Yasako discovering a new identity for herself. In the beginning, she was a lost Japanese woman thrown into American society without much help from her husband at all. He scolded her for being so isolated, but didn't ease her trouble with starting relationships - it was like taking a plant from one garden and tossing it on top of the dirt of a new one, then telling it to grow its roots just as well without actually digging it in. At the end, Yasako makes her own decision for herself, and her identity grows and becomes more solid in this foreign land. She doesn't become totally "American" overnight and lose all of her honor and traditional dignity like Shizuko, but she becomes strong enough that she could survive. In a way, it's the hope of being neither the extreme "Japanese in America" nor the "American 'from Asia' ," but starting to integrate and be a part of the comfortable middle ground of "Asian American." There's the hope that it is possible to be both, you don't have to give up everything and demand all the more like Shizuko, you don't have to cut yourself off as a "stranger from another shore" -- you can be both and combine both.

Yasako ends up being strong enough that she is "to her husband's tastes" and she could keep him if she wants. He obviously does love her, but felt her traditional ways held him back - he wanted to be more American (which isn't really an excuse). He did go back to her from Shizuko and worked so hard to sway the people for her cause, probably being the biggest contribution to the lesser sentence. She could keep him to her now if she really wanted to. But Yasako's strength also enables her to let him go if she wanted to - she could survive emotionally on her own. It would be hard after everything, but she could do it. And there's related hope in that, too. She can make her own decisions for herself - not to fit to peoples' expectations of her, not to please the ancestors or blend in with an ethnic crowd (Asian or Caucasian), but to do what she wants to do for herself. There's freedom. There's hope.